


Sable Cloud

by Anonymous



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 08:36:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20721314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: It's all we have.





	Sable Cloud

**Author's Note:**

> REQUESTED. <3 sorry this took forever!
> 
> anyway. warning for incest shipping? and brief mention of menstruation in the third paragraph :x but mostly i'm warning for incest and vibes of codependency

There was an inventory of things she kept from her brother.

Little things, mostly, inconsequential. A rare butterfly fluttering her way during a hunting trip with their father, cupped for the briefest moment like a jittery gemstone between her palms and letting loose from the gaps between her fingers not a second later. The ghost she thought she’d seen in the space between the curtain and the window of her room, and wasn’t she much too old by then _not_ to dismiss it as a specter of her imagination? The time she’d discovered an unexplainable crack along the leg of one of her porcelain dolls, mourning the damage in stoic privacy through the afternoon’s tutoring session as Ephraim groused obliviously at his textbook beside her.

At thirteen she woke up to a red mess staining her sheets, a strange stinging ache in her midsection, and that too was a memory she kept to herself, locked away beside unmentionable dreams and the smile Lyon had turned to her once, in that shaded garden, distinct from the ones he directed at Ephraim. The one she would only see once, and then never again.

She hid only the small things from him, the embarrassing and trifling, the trivial that did not demand to be shared. The collection kept growing, fragment by fragment, but all the important things he knew, as he should, and she found the more she grew how easy it was to lean against his constant presence, their unspoken understanding.

The night after Renais’ stone shattered and the Lyon they knew vanished completely she buried herself in her brother’s arms, his hand grazing the top of her head as she parted with a fear she’d kept smothered for more years than she could count. _Don’t leave me alone, please promise me you’ll never leave me_, Eirika whispered as though dazed through barely parted lips, and when she looked up it was to meet the tenderly smiling face of the brother she knew well—looking at her like he knew her words to be truth all along, even if she’d never said them.

“Of course I wouldn’t. Why would you ever think I could do something like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said and didn’t think of Lyon, his soul claimed by a monster, didn’t think of their father and countless innocent lives stolen away by war, “I’m sorry for ever doubting you, Brother.”

“We’ve always been together, haven’t we?” Ephraim murmured and it wasn’t a question.

He pulled her close, and she stopped keeping any more secrets from him after that.

It wasn’t odd or strange. It was the most natural thing in the world.

(_And in the end_, Eirika thinks, much later, standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the castle balcony as Ephraim regards the hopeful crowd below—her hand clenched tightly in his where the eyes can’t see, the king and his queen by another name—_in the end, it might have been all we had._)


End file.
